Amref's budget for Katine is unveiled

With a total spend of £2,599,944, Amref has a substantial sum of cash to invest in Katine. But how is it spending that money? If you would like to see what other readers thought of the budget,
take a look at our budget blog

The African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) has published its budget for the entire Katine Community Partnerships Project, showing exactly how it will be spending the funds raised through Guardian readers and sponsorship from Barclays. The bank has given £500,000 to Amref as an upfront payment to get the project underway and will match reader donations up to a further £1m over the life of the three-year project.

Firstly, a word on costs not covered in the following article. The Guardian kick-started the project with a £100,000 donation which is outside of the below budget, while the Guardian and Barclays have absorbed other start-up costs to the tune of £312,000, including: production of the printed Katine supplement; building the Katine website; the original productions from GuardianFilms; the costs incurred (via Panos) in finding and employing Ugandan journalists; and the cost of our independent monitor.

This effectively means the total cost of the Katine project is well over £2.6m, and closer to £3m, but readers are only being asked to donate towards the £2.6m total that Amref will be spending on the project.

It's worth pointing out that all the figures in this article aside, each partner is incurring costs that they are covering themselves, particularly when it comes to staff costs. Amref, for example, says the scale of the project means it is using resources over and above those covered in its budget; and Barclays and the Guardian are incurring substantial staff costs too. We'll publish a separate feature on all these added costs very soon.

Graphic: Paddy Allen Paddy Allen/Guardian Unlimited

Total spend

As you can see from the graph above, Amref will be spending £2,599,944 over three years in total to deliver the project to inhabitants of the six parishes in Katine sub-county – an area of 214 square kilometres serving approximately 25,000 people. More than 77 per cent of the population there live on less than $1 a day.

Project activities

Of the total spend, Amref is spending 75 per cent or £1,939,837 over the three years on project activity-related costs in Katine sub-county. These break down as:

£1,144,656: delivery of activities on the ground£525,474: core team costs, such as salaries and equipment£83,545: project capital costs, such as computers, vehicles, phones£76,963: running costs for Katine office and community resource centre£39,342: monitoring and evaluation activities£69,858: project operational costs such as fuelTOTAL: £1,939,837

The £1,144,656 earmarked for the procurement and delivery of actual activities on the ground across the five key, integrated components (of health, water, education, livelihoods, and governance) breaks down as follows:

Graphic: Paddy Allen Paddy Allen/Guardian Unlimited

It's worth pointing out that the livelihoods component includes the salaries of two Farm-Africa staff (a project officer and a project assistant), whereas the salary costs for the equivalent two Amref staff members across the other components are not included (they appear under the £525,474 set aside for core team costs).

Livelihoods has been allocated 8.6 per cent of the total budget which is slightly less than 11.5 per cent for health and 8 per cent on water and sanitation.

Project management costs

£139,847 (just over five per cent of the budget) is being spent on technical support and assistance provided by Amref's management team in Kampala. This is to ensure that, "50 years of health development in Africa is brought to bear on the delivery of the Katine project."

It includes 20 per cent of the country director and head of programmes' time in supporting the project, and 10 per cent of the finance manager and HR manager's time.

The cost includes technical input from Amref Uganda, HQ (in Nairobi) and other parts of Amref and costs associated with building synergy between the Katine project and other strands of Amref project/programmes in Uganda and Africa. It also includes the cost of a consultant who helped develop project management processes during the start up phase.

UK management costs

A tad under ten per cent or £256,436 of the budget is going towards Amref's UK office, to be spent on: fundraising and donation processing, communications and partnership liaison. Amref says the management of this project requires, "additional roles outside of Amref UK's current capacity to cover and therefore require funding." See the document in its entirety for a full explanation of these costs.

Contingency and agency/organisational support

A little over ten per cent or £263,824 is set aside for contingencies and "organisational support". Money for contingencies (unforeseen problems that might arise) will not be used unless needed, in which case a proposal must be submitted to the Project Governance Committee for approval.

Organisational support and agency costs are, basically, a contribution towards head office costs. Amref says: "Like many international development agencies, the majority of Amref's income is project-based. In order to run our organisation effectively, Amref charges a percentage on all projects tocontribute towards covering our overhead expenditure."

It says the percentage permitted by donors ranges from 8 per cent to 20 per cent. For the Katine project, this has been set at 10 per cent, reflecting the "multi-faceted nature of this initiative and the associated costs involved."

Per capita spend

The graph below shows Amref's per capita spend versus the Ugandan government. Amref argues that its figures are, "in line with the Ugandan government's investment, ensuring the project does not artificially inflate the local economy, thus making the project more sustainable in the long term." But there are clear differences between what the government is spending on individuals across Uganda, and Amref's budget. The largest discrepancy is in education, with Amref spending half the amount the government spends; but in delivering improved livelihoods to Katine locals, Amref is spending 71 per cent more per capita than the government.

Graphic: Paddy Allen Paddy Allen/Guardian Unlimited

I asked Jo Ensor, chief executive of Amref UK, to explain the differences. She began: "The reason why we have a higher spend on water than the government is because we are undertaking an intense amount of infrastructure development in Katine during the project, much more so than a government would normally do in a district in a three year period – and it is expensive.

"The lower education spend is because a large amount of the government budget goes on teachers' salaries. Amref is not paying teachers' salaries and never would – it is unsustainable and should be the role of government. Instead we are spending money on training (capacity building).

"Our spend on health and water and sanitation is about the same as the government, because we ideally want to demonstrate to the government how a good model (of how it could spend its national budget) might work, to better benefit the poor. It's difficult to get a comparable figure for government spend on livelihoods because it encompasses so many different things; and a single figure for government spend on agriculture would not tell the whole story."

What do you think of Amref's budget? Is it spending money in the right areas? How does it compare to other projects of a similar nature? See what other readers thought at our budget debate blog.